Month: August 2012

I aligned the mirrors and powered up the draft hardware for the Nuiteblaster, and it didn’t work. This kind of fails to surprise me, as I changed a lot of stuff in the design. I think my speakers are good, but that using MOSFETs was an error. I used MOSFETs because they have a very low resistance when turned on, so they don’t waste energy as heat.

However, the MOSFETs in the design are switching 12V, and are getting a base drive of 5V. This means the voltage from the gate to the grounded source (Vgs) is at most 5V, because that’s what the Arduino can source, voltage-wise. The voltage from the drain to the source (Vds) is 12V. Since Vgs is > Vth (the point at which the MOSFET turns on), but nowhere near 12V, the MOSFETs are probably not getting driven into saturation, even when the outputs are fully on. This is compounded by the fact that since the code runs the PWM of the Arduino very fast, it is unlikely that that gate capacitance gets fully charged, and so the MOSFETs probably see a much lower average voltage at the gate, and so are probably operating in ohmic mode most of the time.

Whatever the cause, the speaker motion was quite small, and the MOSFETs got so hot that when I licked my finger and touched one of them, it sizzled.

I’m contemplating two possible fixes for this. The first is to replace the MOSFETs with the TIP120 power darlingtons that the schematic calls for. The second is to build my own power darlington transistor out of a 2n2222 switching the gate of the MOSFET to the full 12V of the beefy power supply that I’m driving the whole thing with. This would almost certainly drive the MOSFET into saturation, and hopefully get me the gain that my current rig lacks.

The speakers might also not be the best speakers for the job, but they are the ones I have. If I can’t get the system to work by changing the electronics, I’ll try new speakers next.

OpenOffice (probably LibreOffice too) has limited functionality for setting the background color of a cell. I wrote a little macro that colors each cell blue, with saturation depending on the range of the value. This is in OOBasic, but it demonstrates the general idea, and the proper way of setting cell background colors.

There is an Instructable up on using speakers as galvanometers for a laser projector. This looks just about optimal for the Nuiteblaster, as it provides readable text without defocusing or otherwise spreading the laser beam.

I’ve started building one, with a couple of modifications. Instead of resistors, I’m using diodes to snub the back-EMF from the speakers. I’m also using MOSFETS instead of transistors to switch the power to the speakers. MOSFETS have lower on-resistance than transistors, and so transfer more power and waste less energy as heat. They also have VERY low gate current (low enough to treat as non-existent for my purposes), so there’s no need for current-limiting resistors on the gates, although a resistor might be good to limit any ringing that might happen from slamming 5V into it. Since I’m driving it directly from a 5V microcontroller, gate drive and switching time hopefully won’t be a concern.

“The simple selector matches if all of its components match. ” according to the W3.org page on selectors. That sounds to me like an AND gate, in that something is selected if the logical AND of its components match.

Combine that with logical inversion, provided by the not selector, and it seems to me that you get NAND, which is a universal gate. Any boolean function can be composed of NAND gates, so it is in theory possible to compose an entire CPU out of NAND gates.

This makes it seem to me like you could write a processor simulation in CSS.

The main thing that I wonder about is how browsers evaluate CSS, because if it is not re-evaluated until nothing happens (e.g. nothing gets its attributes changed) then the CPU wouldn’t work because the “output” of a selection would not be able to be used as input into more selections (e.g. by changing their classes). Heck, I’m not sure you can even have CSS change the classes of an element on the fly.